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The era of supersonic commercial flights came to an end when the Concorde completed its last trip between New York and London in 2003, but the allure of ultrafast air

travel never quite died out.

Boom, which has raised $270 million from venture capital firms and other investors, said it planned to introduce aircraft in 2025 and start flight tests in 2026. It expects the plane, which it calls the Overture, to carry passengers before the end of the decade.

The White House on Friday night announced a series of sanctions against Belarus for its forced landing of a Ryanair commercial flight and the subsequent removal and arrest of opposition journalist Roman Protasevich.

The Sunday flight diversion, made under the false pretense of a bomb being onboard the aircraft, comes as the government of Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko faces growing outcry from the West for the nation's recent crackdowns on free speech and public dissent.

In response to Protasevich's arrest, Psaki said the United States had issued a travel advisory urging U.S. citizens not to travel to Belarus, would reimpose sanctions on nine Belarusian state-owned enterprises, and would develop increased sanctions against the Eastern European nation's government, among other actions.

At least three times in the past two months, those militias have used small, explosive-laden drones that divebomb and crash into their targets in late-night attacks on Iraqi bases — including those used by the C.I.A. and U.S. Special Operations units, according to American officials.

Iran — weakened by years of harsh economic sanctions — is using its proxy militias in Iraq to step up pressure on the United States and other world powers to negotiate an easing of those sanctions as part of a revival of the 2015 nuclear deal.

Since late 2019, Iran-backed Iraqi Shiite militias have conducted more than 300 attacks against U.S. interests, killing four Americans and about 25 others, mostly Iraqis, according to a Defense Intelligence Agency assessment published in April. In the last year, a proliferation of previously unknown armed groups have emerged, some claiming responsibility for rocket attacks on U.S. targets.

Media coverage of President Biden’s foreign policy tends to focus on his efforts to withdraw from Afghanistan, get tough on Russia and negotiate with Iran. But none of those may prove as consequential as Mr. Biden’s quiet, incremental, moves to establish official relations with Taiwan. Because only his policy toward Taiwan is meaningfully increasing the risk of world war.

He’s doing so by undoing a diplomatic fiction that for more than 40 years has served the United States, Taiwan and the world exceptionally well.

By keeping U.S. relations with Taiwan unofficial, the “one China” fiction helped Beijing imagine that peaceful reunification remained possible. Which gave it an excuse not to invade.

he Chinese defence ministry urged the United States on Thursday to rein in its frontline forces which Beijing has said have become more active in the air and seas near China this year.

U.S. military presence in the South China Sea, East China Sea and Taiwan Strait is the main destabilising factor in the region.

operations of U.S. warships in the seas around China have risen by 20%, while the activity of U.S. reconnaissance aircraft has risen by 40% compared with last year, Chinese defence ministry spokesman Wu Qian told a press briefing on Thursday.

the Defense Department crossed a Rubicon that for the last six months Pentagon officials have tried to avoid: potentially pitting armed military forces against American citizens in the streets.

History has shown that such events never go well,

the most famous military confrontation with American citizens dates to 1932, when President Herbert Hoover ordered Army troops to clear more than 40,000 people

Donald Trump's era in Washington is over.

The President, addled and mostly friendless, will end his time in the capital a few hours early to spare himself the humiliation of watching his successor be sworn in.

He departs a city under militarized fortification meant to prevent a repeat of the riot he incited earlier this month. He leaves office with more than 400,000 Americans dead from a virus he chose to downplay or ignore.

Several people have been detained in Iran over the accidental shooting down of a Ukrainian passenger plane with a missile, the country's judiciary says.

Ukrainian International Airlines flight PS752 was brought down shortly it took off from Tehran on Wednesday, killing all 176 people on board. Most of the victims were Iranian and Canadian citizens.

For the first three days after the crash, Iran denied that its armed forces had shot down the Boeing 737-800 and suggested there had been a technical failure.But as evidence mounted, the Revolutionary Guards said the operator of a missile defence system had mistaken the aircraft for a US cruise missile and fired at it.

President Donald Trump said Wednesday this year's Independence Day will feature a fireworks display atop Mount Rushmore, an event he would "try" to attend.

In May 2019, South Dakota Republican Gov. Kristi Noem initially announced that the state and the Department of Interior had struck a deal to have the fireworks return to Mt. Rushmore beginning with the 2020 Independence Day celebration. The fireworks had been discontinued in 2009 due to concerns of a wildfire hazard in forests adjacent to the monument. Noem said advancements in pyrotechnics and a strengthened forest led to the decision to have the fireworks return to the site.

Brushing aside what he said were dubious environmental concerns that had previously prevented fireworks at the South Dakota landmark, Trump said he'd secured this year's show easily.Read More"What can burn? It's stone. Nobody knew why," Trump said of the concerns over the environment.

The United States threatened to impose 25% tariffs on cars to push Europeans to initiate proceedings against Iran for violating the nuclear deal, the German defence minister has confirmed.

Kramp-Karrenbauer told reporters on Thursday: “This expression or threat, as you will, does exist.” She is in the UK to meet her counterpart Ben Wallace to discuss Anglo-European defence co-operation post-Brexit.

A Ukrainian Boeing 737 plane was shot down outside Tehran killing all 176 crew and passengers. Iran’s handling of the crash led to four days of street protests mainly in Tehran.

After a volcano exploded in Hawaii in May 2018, US scientists used drones to save a man from the lava: "Follow the drone," they said. He made it through the jungle.Drones save people. They also map terrain, survey land and inspect pipelines. The scientists use drones for these and other purposes on a daily basis, and they have bragged about their successes in the field.Many of the aircraft are made by Chinese companies, though. They are now grounded because of concerns about espionage.

the head of the federal agency, David Bernhardt, is apparently now worried that the drones could be used for espionage.

He is examining the agency's civilian drone programme in an effort to determine whether or not it should be continued. During this time, many of the drones are grounded, according to an agency spokeswoman, Melissa Brown.

The National Defense Authorization Act is an annual measure that secures hazard-pay raises for troops and authorizes funds for aircraft, ships, nuclear weapons, and other national-security programs. Mr. Trump had threatened to veto this year’s bill before it passed Congress, but lawmakers had moved forward anyway, approving it with wide majorities.

Lawmakers haven't forged any agreement for replacing or changing section 230, though members of both parties are critical of it. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) in remarks before the vote on Friday said the Senate needed to pass the defense bill as soon as possible.

Every president since Lyndon Johnson has had Congress override at least one of their vetoes. Congress last did so in 2016, after then-President Barack Obama blocked a bill letting Americans sue foreign governments over terrorist attacks.

The federal government could render homelessness rare, brief and nonrecurring. The cure for homelessness is housing, and, as it happens, the money is available: Congress could shift billions in annual federal subsidies from rich homeowners to people who don’t have homes.

Instead, Americans have taken to treating homelessness as a sad fact of life, as if it were perfectly normal that many thousands of adults and children in the wealthiest nation on earth cannot afford a place to live.

Government programs focus on palliative care: Annual spending on shelters has reached $12 billion a year

You don’t get sick on airplanes any more than anywhere else. Really, you don’t.

consider this fact: The ventilation system requirements for airplanes meet the levels recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for u

There are fairly simple things you can do, if you do need to travel, to reduce the odds of getting sick.

FRANKFURT — The auto parts maker Continental became the latest German company to issue a confessional study of its Nazi past Thursday, saying it was “a pillar of the National Socialist armaments and war economy” that employed around 10,000 slave laborers, often in inhumane conditions.

During the war, when Continental supplied tires for military aircraft and vehicles, the company used concentration camp inmates to test products and the inmates often died as a result, according to the study by Paul Erker, a historian at Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich commissioned by Continental to examine its past.

Yet after the war, top managers of the company managed to escape punishment and pursue successful careers, according to Mr. Erker, who spent four years doing research for an 800-page book on Continental’s wartime history.

Exacerbated by wind gusts of up to 70 miles per hour and extremely dry conditions, a fast-moving wildfire spread to more than 6,000 acres in Southern California on Thursday, forcing the evacuation of 25,000 residents, officials said.

Fire officials attributed the spread of the Bond fire to the winds.The blaze began as a house fire in Silverado, about 50 miles from Los Angeles, and quickly spread to the surrounding area, fire officials said. The cause was under investigation.

Chief Fennessy said that more than 500 firefighters were battling the flames and that more than 30 agencies were involved in the effort, which included fixed-wing aircraft and helicopters.

Two American B-52 bombers flew a show-of-force mission in the Persian Gulf on Thursday that military officials said was intended to deter Iran and its proxies from carrying out attacks against United States troops in the Middle East amid rising tensions between the two countries.

The multinational mission, which included aircraft from Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Bahrain, was routed well outside Iranian air space.

The flight on Thursday comes on the heels of the assassination last month of Iran’s top nuclear scientist, an attack Iran has blamed on Israel with possible American complicity. The bomber missions also come just weeks before the anniversary of the American drone strike in January that killed a senior Iranian commander, Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, in Iraq.

“The U.S. government must define what the message is, what it stands for,” the report asserts. “We should offer an example of moral leadership in the world, committed to treat people humanely, abide by the rule of law, and be generous and caring to our neighbors. . . . We need to defend our ideals abroad vigorously. America does stand up for its values.”

the authors pause to make a rousing case for the power of the nation’s character.

Rather than exemplify the nation’s highest values, the official response to 9/11 unleashed some of its worst qualities: deception, brutality, arrogance, ignorance, delusion, overreach and carelessness.

For nearly two decades, the U.S. and the European Union vacillated over how to deal with the Russian leader as he resorted to increasingly aggressive steps to reassert Moscow’s dominion over Ukraine and other former Soviet republics.

A look back at the history of the Russian-Western tensions, based on interviews with more than 30 past and present policy makers in the U.S., EU, Ukraine and Russia, shows how Western security policies angered Moscow without deterring it.

t also shows how Mr. Putin consistently viewed Ukraine as existential for his project of restoring Russian greatness.

Top U.S. and Russian diplomats agreed Friday to keep talking in the standoff over Ukraine, even though their meeting produced no movement in the crisis that has seen Moscow mass tens of thousands of troops at the border and the West ramp up supplies of weapons to Kyiv.With fears of an invasion of Ukraine running high and seemingly intractable demands, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov met for about 90 minutes in Geneva at what the American said was a “critical moment.”Expectations were low going in, and there was no breakthrough.Blinken told Lavrov the U.S. would give Russia written responses to Moscow’s proposals next week and suggested the two would likely meet again shortly after that — offering some hope that any invasion would be delayed for at least a few more days.

Blinken said the U.S. would be open to a meeting between Putin and U.S. President Joe Biden, if it would be “useful and productive.” The two have met once in person in Geneva and have had several virtual conversations on Ukraine that have proven largely inconclusive.

The Pentagon said the USS Harry S Truman aircraft carrier and its strike group will participate in a NATO maritime exercise in the Mediterranean, which will continue through Feb. 4 — something that has been planned since 2020, said Pentagon press secretary John Kirby. He said officials considered whether to go ahead with the exercise, because of the ongoing tensions, and decided to move ahead.